August 2024 Newsletter

Do We Need to Get Schooled? 🏫🎓

Hello Readers,

Is college overrated?

Many think so, fueled by the student debt crisis that saddles millions with huge loans for low-utility degrees.

Yes, these are largely self-inflicted wounds. Nobody forces these kids to choose dead-end majors at expensive schools financed by high-interest loans. But the system is also to blame.

Banks that won’t grant a $20,000 small business loan to a twenty-year-old will happily loan that same kid a six-figure loan to pursue an obscure degree, with a payback period spanning decades. It is a deeply flawed system.

Simply forgiving these loans isn’t the answer because forgiveness comes from tax revenue. Collectively, we shouldn’t be paying for the questionable decisions of others. Reforming student loans with reasonable interest rates and expanding service-oriented forgiveness programs are fairer and more logical options.

As a graduate, I generally believe in college’s value, and not because my parents guided me down that path or financed my college education.

Both parents came from working-class backgrounds and weren’t educated beyond high school. They were bright, capable people, but not academically oriented.

My dad was a factory worker hired without a high school degree. He also enlisted in the army without a high school education at seventeen with no problem. He advanced from a manual labor job on a production line to supervision, and at that point, he was forced to get his high school diploma to keep his management job. Under duress, he attended night school and earned a diploma.

Without a degree, he was able to earn a middle-class living, which included a nice little house in the suburbs, two cars in the garage, and summer vacations at the lake. We were not rich by any means, but comfortable.

If I grew up in the same era as my father, I might have skipped college as well. I never had a drive toward education; I just wanted a decent job. By the time I reached adulthood in the 1980s, however, the era of landing career jobs with just a high school diploma was mostly over.

I was a bad student; I treated high school as a nuisance and didn’t try. My grades reflected that complacency, so I didn’t have a pathway to college. Chalk it up to immaturity and lack of discipline.

As I progressed through high school, my options became apparent: find a minimum-wage job or join the military.

A few months after barely graduating high school by the skin of my teeth, I was on a Greyhound bus to Detroit to enlist in the army. About a month into basic training, I realized I had perhaps failed to think things through. As much as I believed in the cause and wanted to honor the family tradition (nearly every male on both sides of my family served), the military wasn’t the career for me for reasons I don’t need to get into in this particular newsletter.

I did my army time and applied to colleges toward the end of my enlistment. This time, instilled with focus and discipline (and the fear of eating army chow and MREs for the rest of my career), I kicked ass in class.  

I was essentially Billy Madison, an “older” freshman (at the ripe old age of twenty-one) sitting amongst mostly wet behind-the-ears teenagers with varying levels of maturity and dedication.

The curriculum wasn’t as important as the process, which included absorbing lectures, taking notes, reading textbooks, and studying for quizzes and exams. A lot of what I learned in the 1990s is obsolete, especially concerning technology. I never used much of what I learned in any practical way. However, I learned how to learn efficiently, which made the experience valuable and something that would serve me throughout my life.

Another useful aspect was the interaction with professors. Even back then, there was a fair amount of social and political indoctrination, with professors comfortably imposing their personal views on students. Argue at your own GPA’s peril.

I’m not saying it was valuable or appropriate to be targeted for indoctrination; it was beneficial to learn that many in authority will happily subordinate their professionalism to improperly exert influence.

To be fair, I was a business student, so there were fewer opportunities to indoctrinate. The pre-major “liberal arts” portion of my education, with classes like Intro to Sociology, Modernism, and Human Geography, allowed for the regular injection of personal opinions, whereas Applicable Finite Mathematics, Economics, and Business Law were more objective and, thankfully, elicited less professorial emotion.

I developed a theory about professors in general: the more personal influence a professor imposed upon students in class, the less empirical the field of study is. Have chemistry or physics professors ever cared about their students’ political affiliations?

I was immune to it because I already had the pleasure of being brainwashed by the U.S. Army, by drill sergeants who made these pointy-headed professors look like soft little cupcakes. As a result, very little of my brain remained available for washing by the time I attended college. I kicked back and listened, tried not to roll my eyes or smirk, and delivered the assignments they required on time.

It was a variation on this exchange from the movie Forrest Gump:

Drill Sergeant: Gump! What’s your sole purpose in this army?

Forrest Gump: To do whatever you tell me, drill sergeant!

Drill Sergeant: Goddamn it, Gump! You’re a goddamn genius! This is the most outstanding answer I have ever heard. You must have a goddamn I.Q. of 160. You are goddamn gifted, Private Gump.

Like Forrest, I was also gifted with a dedication to a mission: to earn a degree and get a job. So, I gave the professors what they asked for.

My mentality was to treat college like a trade school. Functional, skill-based, and a means to an end. I didn’t attend because Mommy and Daddy expected it, to “find myself”, or to make friends. So maybe that distinguished me from a typical student.

Over the past decade, there has been a push to encourage young people to consider the trades as an alternative career option. Anecdotally, I don’t see parents in my circle of friends and neighbors nudging their kids in that direction.

It seems to be a grand theory as long as it’s someone else’s kid. Many college-educated parents need their kids to flaunt that degree on the wall; it is a clear indicator you have a bright kid raised by attentive parents. Whether this mirrors reality is another story.

I would love to see a return to an emphasis on trades, where they are considered just as important as degreed professions. Perhaps the student loan crisis will drive things in that direction.

Take care,

---

---

---

---